Immanuel Kant lived his public life under surveillance. When the Enlightenment's greatest philosopher took his regular afternoon walk, everyone in the city of Königsberg knew his identity and routine – to the extent, according to legend, of setting their clocks by his time of passing.

Such public scrutiny wasn't particular to philosophers, or to 18th century Prussia. For most of human history, most people lived in settings in which every individual who stepped out automatically revealed to the world their station in life (Shakespeare's audiences knew well what was meant by "the sign of your profession") and probably their identity, too. And who knew that if they behaved inappropriately, they or their families would suffer the consequences.

For a brief period of history, since the Enlightenment and industrial revolution, in fact, we've had a choice in the matter. Western city-dwellers, at least, have enjoyed the privilege of walking out anonymously in public spaces. Now, errant royals apart, most of us seem to want to return to the pre-privacy age. As teenagers we may revel in edgy urban anonymity, but the moment we start accumulating kids and expensive possessions we start yearning to live in the sort of communities where everyone knows who we are. If we can afford it, we move to one. If we can't, we start lobbying for CCTV.

As the number of people who can't afford to move to rural idylls vastly outnumbers those who can, that makes for a powerful CCTV lobby. Ask any elected politician. Throw in an energetic CCTV supplier industry, police forces keen to cut operational costs and a series of home secretaries desperate to be doing something to reduce the fear of crime, and in 20 years you reach the point where the UK is the most CCTVed society on the planet.

I'm personally relaxed about being videoed in urban public places and on public roads. But even I am not going to say we have got it right. Given the lack of good data about whether CCTV does enough good to justify its cost and ugliness, it's hard to argue with Dominic Raab's verdict in The Assault on Liberty that we have ended up with the worst of all worlds, "no safer on the streets and left to foot the bill for hundreds of millions of pounds so poorly invested".

The latest evidence that something isn't working comes from the internal report prised from Scotland Yard under the Freedom of Information Act.

The headline statistic that only one camera in 1,000 has produced footage to help solve a crime isn't damning in itself. Senior police officers are always more interested in solving crimes than preventing them; that's why they fought the politicians so hard over bobbies on the beat. What does worry is that, if it is widely perceived that footage from CCTV cameras is either not properly examined or not fit for purpose in the first place, any deterrent or displacement effect on crime will be nullified. To judge from two extensively CCTVed town centres I know well, this perception is already prevalent.

Where do we go from here? The Scotland Yard answer is apparently more money to create specialist video investigation units. However the resources would have to come from somewhere, and might tip whatever business case exists for CCTV against the technology. There are other possibilities – Japanese-style police boxes on every street, perhaps, occupied 24 hours a day.

A more imaginative way to get more out of the CCTV infrastructure might be to give it back to the community – to put the feed from every taxpayer-funded camera online, for monitoring by citizens (and, inevitably, criminals); a sort of real-time Street View. That might restore some popular sanctions against bad behaviour that was universal in a pre-industrial age while enabling the police to investigate serious crimes.

I suspect in the future there will be a mix of approaches to surveillance, ideally systematically and transparently evaluated against each other, and subject to democratic control. And this in turn raises the possibility of neighbourhoods voting against electronic surveillance altogether. I hope one or two do – to provide a control group for evaluation and a realm for our inner teenager to cut free.

Readers will notice that I've avoided the question of privacy. This is deliberate. I believe that there can be no such thing as privacy in a public space – are the two concepts not opposites? The place for privacy is in our homes, and in our heads. Everyone in Königsberg knew where Kant went for his walk, but no one else knew what was going on inside that enlightened mind.